The Year's Best Science Fiction: Second Annual Collection Read online

  FOR

  Susan Casper and Christopher Casper

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  The editor would like to thank the following people for their help and support:

  Michael Swanwick, Susan Casper, Jack Dann, Virginia Kidd, Ellen Datlow, Shawna McCarthy, Sheila Williams, Edward Ferman, Lewis Shiner, Bruce Sterling, Pat Lo Brutto, Terrence Rafferty, Gene Wolfe, Claire Eddy, Susan Allison, Ginjer Buchanan, Scott Edelman, Beth Meacham, Lou Aronica, Tappan King, Charles L. Grant, Stuart Schiff, Janet & Ricky Kagan, John Clute, Greg Feeley, Bob Walters, Don Wollheim, George Scithers, John Kessel, James Patrick Kelly, Jane Yolen, Rena Yount, Kim Stanley Robinson, Lucius Shepard, Corroboree Press, the staff of Sir Speedy Xeroxing on 13th St. in Philadelphia (and especially Lisa), Joann Hill, and special thanks to my own editor, Jim Frenkel.

  Thanks are also due to Charles N. Brown, whose newszine Locus (P.O. Box 13305, Oakland, California 94661; subscription rate: $31 for 12 issues by First Class Mail) was used as a reference source throughout the Summation, and to Andrew Porter, whose newszine Science Fiction Chronicle (P.O. Box 4175, New York, N.Y. 10163-4175; subscription rate: $21 for one year) was also used as a reference source throughout.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  INTRODUCTION - Summation: 1984

  Salvador – Lucius Shepard

  Promises To Keep – Jack McDevitt

  Bloodchild – Octavia E. Butler

  Blued Moon – Connie Willis

  A Message to the King of Brobdingnag – Richard Cowper

  The Affair – Robert Silverberg

  Press Enter – John Varley

  New Rose Hotel – William Gibson

  The Map – Gene Wolfe

  Interlocking Pieces – Molly Gloss

  Trojan Horse – Michael Swanwick

  Bad Medicine – Jack Dann

  At the Embassy Club – Elizabeth A. Lynn

  Pursuit of Excellence – Rena Yount

  The Kindly Isle – Frederik Pohl

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  Rock On – Pat Cadigan

  Sunken Gardens – Bruce Sterling

  Trinity – Nancy Kress

  The Trouble with the Cotton People – Ursula K. Le Guin

  Twilight Time – Lewis Shiner

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  Black Coral – Lucius Shepard

  Friend – James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel

  Foreign Skins – Tanith Lee

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  Company in the Wings – R. A. Lafferty

  I

  II

  A Cabin on the Coast – Gene Wolfe

  The Lucky Strike – Kim Stanley Robinson

  BOOKS BY GARDNER DOZOIS

  HONORABLE MENTIONS:

  ABOUT THE EDITOR

  Copyright Page

  INTRODUCTION

  Summation: 1984

  In spite of its ominous literary associations, 1984 proved to be a rather quiet year for SF. There were no major scandals like 1983’s infamous Great Timescape Fiasco, no SF lines driven into oblivion by corporate greed and shortsightedness, no major editorial shakeups … but if you looked closely enough, in the right places, you could see the foundations of the genre’s future for the next decade or so being quietly laid down.

  After the bitter hard winter of the recent recession in the publishing industry, there were some signs this year of an at least momentary thaw. Most promising were the creation of new SF lines, or the creative blossoming of older ones.

  Bluejay Books has already survived for a good deal longer than skeptics were saying it would at the end of 1983. Bluejay had its first full year of operation in 1984, turning out, under the editorship of Jim Frenkel, an ambitious program of hardcovers and trade paperbacks, including this anthology and last year’s First Annual Collection. Major novels by Jack Dann, Joan D. Vinge, Vernor Vinge, K.W. Jeter, and others appeared from Bluejay in 1984; upcoming in 1985 are books by Connie Willis, Nancy Kress, and John Kessel and James Patrick Kelly, among others, and, if they continue to do so well, Bluejay Books could well become one of the major SF book lines of the ’80s. Even more impressive in some ways has been the success of the resurrected Ace Specials line, edited by Terry Carr. The new line of Specials—all first novels, by writers such as William Gibson, Kim Stanley Robinson, Lucius Shepard, Howard Waldrop, Carter Scholz, and Glenn Hartcourt—were probably the most talked-about and favorably-reviewed books of the year, with Gibson and Robinson’s debuts in particular generating an unusual amount of acclaim; coming up are more Specials, from Michael Swanwick and others. Meanwhile, the regular Ace/Berkley lines, under the editorship of senior editor Susan Allison and new Ace editor Ginjer Buchanan, also continued to turn out first-rate and often offbeat work by authors such as James P. Blaylock, Jody Scott, Damon Knight, Kim Stanley Robinson, and others. Tor expanded at a terrific rate this year, and under the editorship of new senior editor Beth Meacham and a number of consulting editors—David Hartwell, Terry Carr, Ben Bova—are putting together an ambitious program of SF and fantasy, with upcoming books by James Tiptree, Jr., Gregory Benford, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Lucius Shepard, among others. New publisher Baen Books, helmed by Jim Baen and Betsy Mitchell, turned out its first SF titles in 1984, beginning with a strong first novel by Lewis Shiner. Bantam now has one of the strongest and most consistent SF lines it’s had in years, put together by editor Lou Aronica, who had strong titles out this year by Samuel R. Delany, R.A. MacAvoy, David Brin, and David R. Palmer. Arbor House’s new SF line lost Robert Silverberg as editor late in 1983, but he was replaced in mid-1984 by David Hartwell, who took over there as Director of Science Fiction while continuing to work on a consulting basis for Tor; upcoming from Arbor House in 1985 are novels by Bruce Sterling, Greg Bear, Michael Bishop, and Roger Zelazny, among others. Meanwhile, Robert Silverberg is creating a new SF hardcover line for new publisher Donald I. Fine Books. Warner Books is creating yet another new SF paperback line, Questar, helmed by a staff of four editors. Avon is expanding its SF line under editor John Douglas. The new George Zebrowski-edited line of classic reprints for Crown is selling well. And the DAW and Del Rey lines remain enormously successful commercial propositions, with Del Rey in particular dominating last year’s nationwide bestseller lists.

  Advances are slowly coming up again for many authors, sales are generally up, and expansion is in the air. Tor is now putting out six titles a month, Avon is going to two titles a month, as is Warner, DAW has gone up to eight titles a month, and Ace/Berkley is now putting out fifteen titles a month. The success of Waldenbooks’ Otherworlds Club, a retail book-buyers club which has started selling small-press editions by mail-order, has given a much-needed shot in the arm to the small SF and fantasy specialty publishers—and those small-press publishers themselves are becoming an ever-more important part of the SF scene, bringing out many of the marginal but important books that the more timid corporate publishers refuse to take a chance on … and doing well with them, for the most part.

  In other words, we are enjoying another mini-boom, a (so far) scaled-down version of the Big SF Boom of the late ’70s. After living through the bleak days of the recent recession, I feel a residual wariness about throwing my hat in the air and declaring that Happy Days Are Here Again, wondering how good things are going to get this time around and (much more importantly)
for how many of us. And for how long—one really bad sales year, for instance, would probably be frost enough to shrivel many of these hopeful new buds. Nevertheless, wariness having been given a nod, it’s hard to deny that (for the moment at least) things are looking considerably better for the field than they were a couple of years ago.

  One of the things that makes me the most hopeful is the recent heavy influx of talented new writers.

  As I explained in last year’s anthology, new talent seems to enter the SF world in waves, discrete generational groupings, usually at five-to-ten-year intervals. Now, at the beginning of the ’80s, we are clearly in the process of assimilating yet another generational wave of hot new writers, and in the years to come you will be hearing a whole lot more about writers such as William Gibson, Michael Swanwick, Kim Stanley Robinson, Bruce Sterling, Greg Bear, Pat Cadigan, John Kessel, Lucius Shepard, Lewis Shiner, Connie Willis, James Patrick Kelly, Leigh Kennedy, Nancy Kress, John M. Ford, Tim Powers, David Brin, and Pat Murphy … to name just some of the most prominent of those on the leading edge of this massive generational wave.

  Not all of these writers are of the same aesthetic school or movement, by any means. Many of them don’t even much like each other’s work, and the last time I listed in print the writers of the “‘80s generation,” some of them protested bitterly at being lumped in with the others. (About the closest thing here to a self-willed aesthetic “school” would be that group of writers, purveyors of bizarre hard-edged high-tech stuff, who have on occasion been referred to as “cyberpunks”—Sterling, Gibson, Shiner, Cadigan, Bear.) Nevertheless, they are the “’80s generation” in SF, or part of it, and as such, whether they like it or not, the similarities in goals and aesthetics between them are much stronger and more noticable than the (admittedly real) differences. For one thing, they are all ambitious writers, not satisfied to keep turning out the Same Old Stuff. Once again it is a time for literary risk-taking, and once again those who take them are admirable … and that makes it an exciting time for SF as a genre.

  You have to be a little crazy to try to do good work in SF, a field where indifferent, run-of-the-mill, lowest-common-denominator work is often not only tolerated but actively rewarded … and where good work is often not only ignored, but, in many cases, greeted with outright hostility. About the only thing that has saved SF, kept it evolving, is the constant influx of new young writers, writers young and enthusiastic enough to actually work harder than they need to work for the same kind of money they’d have gotten for producing a formula space opera. Eventually, many of them burn out, wear themselves smooth, get tired and cynical, and opt for the easier way. But SF has so far been lucky in always having a new generation of writers waiting to snatch up the torch (with naive enthusiasm, of course) as the previous generation lets it slip from numbed hands. As long as this remains true, as long as there are talented new writers coming along, then SF as a genre will probably endure, and quite possibly prosper.

  The short-fiction market was somewhat weaker overall in 1984 than 1983, producing fewer really first-rate stories. There are so many stories published every year, though, that a certain percentage of them are bound to be good—and indeed, some excellent stuff did appear in 1984, although you perhaps had to sift through a higher percentage of chaff to get at it than you did last year. Sales seemed to also be down somewhat across the board for most of the genre SF magazines, particularly newsstand sales … it should be noted, however, that if things didn’t look quite as rosy in the magazine market this year as last, neither did they look anywhere near as black as they had in 1981 or 1982. Most of the major SF magazines, seem to be in moderately good health, and even those for which the deathwatch has been started are by no means certain to fail. New markets are also promised for the coming year, although it’s probable that, as always, some of these will prove to be illusionary.

  Omni’s circulation seemed as high as ever this year, but its impact on the short-fiction scene was somewhat diminished. It had been announced at the end of 1983 that Omni was going to allot a larger percentage of each issue to fiction in 1984, publishing both more stories per issue and longer stories—but instead the publishers cut the space allocated for fiction almost in half, reportedly to make room for more pages of advertising. This meant that Omni published only about half its usual number of stories this year, and I know from stories seen in manuscript that fiction editor Ellen Datlow was forced to leave in inventory several excellent stories that normally would have been published in 1984; a few of the larger, novella-length stories in inventory may never see print in Omni at all. This is a disappointing and short-sighted policy for a magazine that already had far too high a proportion of advertisements, and it is to be hoped that they will think better of it in the future. In spite of cutbacks, Omni published excellent stories this year by Michael Swanwick, Bruce Sterling, Pat Cadigan, William Gibson, Elizabeth A. Lynn, and others.

  The Best of Omni Science Fiction, an anthology in magazine form, has been discontinued in favor of a series of retrospective “Best of Omni” book anthologies.

  The genre magazine market—as opposed to Omni, which is not an SF magazine per se—was somewhat weak overall this year, with most of the good stuff concentrated in one or two markets. In fact, if you read Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction this year, you probably caught about 80% of the really first-rate work produced in the American magazine market.

  Circulation was down slightly at Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine—from the 130,000 copy-per-issue range to about the 110,000 copy-per-issue range—although as far as literary quality is concerned, IASFM had one of its best years ever, dominating the Nebula nomination lists in the novella and novelet categories. Editor Shawna McCarthy won a well-deserved Best Editor Hugo in Los Angeles last year, and deserves to win another one this year. The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction is perhaps still more consistent in literary quality than IASFM—lASFM’s quality can vary widely from story to story, including a few things much worse than anything you’re likely to find in F&SF—but issue for issue IASFM published more really excellent stories this year than F&SF, the first time any genre magazine has accomplished that feat in a decade or more. Major stories by Octavia E. Butler, John Varley, Jack Dann, Nancy Kress, Frederik Pohl, Connie Willis, Jack McDevitt, Lewis Shiner, John Kessel, James Patrick Kelly, Marta Randall and Lucius Shepard appeared in IASFM this year, as well as much good work by other hands.

  Analog, IASFM’s sister magazine, had a particularly dull year in 1984. I’ve said this before, other years, but for the most part I find the stuff that Analog publishes at shorter lengths to be gray, dull, and overly familiar. You rarely see anything in Analog anymore that pushes at the boundaries of the stereotypical “Analog story”—last year’s Nebula-winning “Blood Music” was a rare exception, and I wish editor Stanley Schmidt would loosen up and take a few more such chances with what’s become an overly restrictive editorial formula. It seems to me that much stuff that’s appearing elsewhere—Swanwick’s “Trojan Horse,” for instance, from this year’s Omni, or Varley’s PRESS ENTER, from IASFM—could legitimately fall within Analog’s purview, without changing it into a freaky custardheaded New Wave publication, and that the magazine would be much the better for having its horizons broadened in that fashion. There was little of really first-rate quality in Analog this year, although solid work by Charles Harness, Ben Bova, Timothy Zahn, Bob Buckley, Charles Sheffield, Eric G. Iverson, and others, did appear.

  As always, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction remained the most dependable read in SF, as it has been for the past thirty years, maintaining an incredible consistency of quality while other magazines rise and fall and fluctuate around it. There have been long stretches when F&SF was the only refuge in the genre for quality short fiction, and it’s frightening to imagine what shape the SF short-story would be in today if F&SF had never existed. They perhaps published fewer important stori
es this year than last, but “fewer” is a relative term—major work by Gene Wolfe, Lucius Shepard, Richard Cowper, Kim Stanley Robinson, Jack Dann, Bruce Sterling, Terence M. Green, Lewis Shiner, M. Sargent Mackay, Molly Gloss, Pat Cadigan, and many others did appear in F&SF in 1984. (As usual, alas, F&SF remains hard to find on many newsstands, so I’ll include their subscription address: Mercury Press, Inc., Box 56, Cornwall, Connecticut 06753; annual subscription—12 issues—$17.50)

  The overall quality of the fiction was also down somewhat at Amazing this year, although they did publish first-rate novellas by Avram Davidson and Gerald Pearce, and good work by Keith Roberts, Phyllis Eisenstein, Michael Swanwick, and Somtow Sucharitkul. Although he published fewer major stories this year than last, editor George Scithers has for the most part been doing a pretty good job of renovating Amazing—unfortunately, it looks more than ever as if the effort may have been in vain. Amazing’s circulation remains disastrously low: about 11,000 copies per issue, by far the lowest circulation of all the digest-sized magazines, and even beginning to edge down into the range where it would be rivaled for circulation by the major semiprozines, like Locus. Circulation even seems to be down slightly from last year, as far as I can tell. Scithers has specifically denied last year’s rumor that he had been guaranteed three years of sponsorship by TSR Hobbies, Amazing’s new owner, saying that there is no specified time period involved in TSR’s backing of the magazine. Which makes the question of how long a financially-ailing TSR will be willing to carry Amazing as a money-losing proposition even more germane; certainly if the circulation remains at its present level, the magazine cannot long survive. Amazing’s only real hope for survival is to bring its subscription rate up dramatically, as The Twilight Zone Magazine managed to do in 1983 by offering discount subscriptions through Publisher’s Clearing House. Scithers says that “we are finally getting our act together as regards subscriptions,” and that a big push to bring the subscription rate up will begin in 1985. Amazing may also be given some much-needed help by Steven Spielberg’s new NBC— TV series Amazing Stories; the rental fee paid to the magazine for use of the title will help somewhat, but much more important is the publicity boost and increase in name recognition (which will hopefully translate into a boost in sales) that Amazing could receive if the television series is a hit. Amazing deserves to survive, and I hope things work out for them. (Since Amazing is also hard to find on most newsstands, I’ll give their subscription address as well: Dragon Publishing, P.O. Box 72089, Chicago, Illinois 60690; $9 for 6 issues—one year—or $16 for 12 issues—two years.)